Kar Wai Wong

Born: 02 September, 1958 Country of Birth: People's Republic of China Music is paramount. It gives a film its rhythm.

Born in Shanghai in 1958, Wong Kar-Wai (Wang Jiawei) emigrated to Hong Kong with his parents at the age of five, leaving behind siblings he did not see again until he his mid-teens. While studying graphic design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic, Wong developed a deep passion for photography and the works of Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Avedon. After graduating in 1980, he enrolled in the production training course at television station TVB, working as production assistant on drama serials. Two years later, he took up full-time scriptwriting for feature films; of the ten feature scripts he wrote during the mid-eighties, Wong considers Final Victory (1986), directed by his mentor Patrick Tam, to be his best script.

Though his first feature, As Tears Go By (1988), bore a heavy debt to Scorsese’s Mean Streets, the film revealed a stunningly original visual style and was a hit with local audiences. Wong has since been hailed as an important director of the second New Wave, among directors such as Eddie Fong, Stanley Kwan and Clara Law who inherited and developed the aesthetics of the New Wave (Patrick Tam, Tsui Hark and Ann Hui).

Despite an all-star cast and success at the Hong Kong Film Awards, his second work, Days of Being Wild (1990) was less popular at the box-office. Wong’s international popularity, however, was firmly established by Chungking Express (1994) and Fallen Angels (1995). Both were developed during breaks in the post-production of his period martial-arts film Ashes of Time (1994). Happy Together (1997), a bold exploration of the relationship between two Chinese homosexuals, earned Wong the Best Director award at Cannes, and both In The Mood For Love (2000) and 2046 (2004) have been offically selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Attributing the influence for his non-linear story-telling to the Argentine writer Manuel Puig, Wong’s style is instantly recognisable for his use of colour and music to convey emotion, his emphasis on detail over the whole, and his preoccupation with time and memory in the context of loneliness.

Acknowledged as one of the most exciting directors in contemporary cinema, Wong Kar-Wai has fuelled a growing interest in Asian film and is becoming one of the most influential directors in modern times.